As part of Lagom’s ongoing “leg up” work, earlier this year Adam and I gave a (virtual) talk to some MA Design Management students at Birmingham City University about the work we do as user researchers and how we make sure that we meet our user research standards.
Given that this was a virtual session, it was a little difficult to know how well it would work – would the students be interested in what we were saying? And how would we know whether or not they were interested in what we were saying? It can be really difficult to read the “room” when you’re screen-sharing on a video call and you can’t see everyone’s face.
We decided to use the Mentimeter tool to make the session more interactive. This enabled us to add multiple choice questions throughout the presentation that the attendees could respond to on their phones. This created some interesting discussions in itself – one of these being that some of the students were surprised by how many observations we can capture from a single feedback session.
I think the interactive elements of the talk worked well and helped to make the session much more engaging than it might have been if we’d just talked at the group for 45 minutes. We were asked some really insightful questions at the end of the session and it was clear that the attendees had taken in what we’d said to them – some of their questions really made us think!
It was a really enjoyable session and I felt that I got a lot out of it – I hope that the attendees did too. A couple of the students who came to the talk will actually be joining us as interns over the next few weeks and I’m really looking forward to working with them!
